Early Preview: 2012 Upper Deck Marvel Premier

Upper Deck is taking a page out of the sports card world and offering a high-end comic set, in October Upper Deck will be releasing Marvel Premier. The product was announced last week at San Diego Comic-Con. Each 4-card pack of Marvel Premier will run $200 and will contain a base card (which is #/99), a 1/1 sketch card, a multi-hinged sketch card and the fourth card will be either a Classic Corners card, a Shadowbox card or an “Emotion” booklet card.

Upper Deck’s reasoning is that comic collectors have put out big bucks from some of their premium inserts over the years so they want to provide collectors with a premium high-end product. I have been reading through some of the graphic novel and comic card collector’s forums and I have to say, Upper Deck has seriously over-estimated this part of the market. While many collectors like the product (I will admit, they are pretty sweet and would fulfill my inner geek) but not many seem ready to drop $200 for a base card, 2 sketch cards and either a manu-patch, shadowbox or mystery “Emotion” booklet card. Most have the “wait until next year” attitude when packs will be selling at $50 and individual cards are pennies on the dollar.

A Box Break:

The premium base card set will consist of a 50-card checklist with each thick-card stock card #/99. With one base card per pack, a 50-card checklist and 99 copies of each card that means there will be 4,950 total packs released.

 The sketch cards and multi-hinged sketch cards will all be 1/1, meaning there will be nearly 5,000 individual sketch cards, I am not sure of the hinged sketch card totals. The set will include work from some top artists; some of the names already announced are Cruddle Torrain, Jason Adams and NAR! The multi-hinged sketch cards are an enlarged sketch cards that are folded two, three or four times. So you will receive two different sketch cards per pack, an individual one and a hinged one.

The fourth card will be one of these three types of cards:

The Classic Corners card, a manufactured patch that looks like one of Marvel’s classic corner pieces from a graphic novel.

The Shadowbox card, building on the popular shadowbox cards Upper Deck brings them over to the Marvel World. To note, Rittenhouse did release a 6-card shadowbox set as part of the Marvel Greatest Heroes last March.

The “Emotion” Booklet card has not been previewed yet but Jason Adams and NAR! will be the artists creating this insert. I am guessing that Upper Deck plans on keeping these booklet cards a bit of a mystery until release date in a similar manor as the Shadowbox cards a couple of years ago.